Hello again, dear one.
Come, sit beside me.
The winds are calm tonight, and the stars are steady.
Let me tell you a story—not of empires or battles, but of a voice… soft as breath… that still echoes across the centuries.
What survives of her could fit in your palm.
Not her body, not her house, not her name carved in stone—but scraps. Wisps of ink on brittle papyrus. A half-line here. A torn word there. A poem that ends mid-breath, like someone was interrupted while whispering a secret.
She lived over 2,600 years ago… and yet, even now, her words burn.
“Someone will remember us,” she wrote, “I say even in another time.”
And someone did. Monks copying old scrolls. Traders passing songs down the coastline. Archaeologists unrolling ancient texts from the trash heaps of forgotten cities. And then… you. Listening. Wondering.
Her name was Sappho.
Where others carved laws or charted the stars, she reached into her own heart—then offered it, tender and trembling, to the world. She sang of longing, of love, of jealousy. Of girls with sunlight in their hair. Of joy so sharp it could shatter you. Of pain so quiet it could vanish in a sigh.
She didn’t write for power. She didn’t write for glory.
She wrote for someone.
And that someone might have been you.
Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos, in the blue shimmer of the Aegean Sea, sometime around 630 BCE.
It was a time of warriors and laws, temples and trade. A time when stories were sung more often than written, when gods were everywhere and politics were local. In Athens, men were debating justice and shaping new systems of power. But on Lesbos? A different kind of revolution was quietly unfolding.
Sappho’s world was not ruled by armies or councils. It was ruled by feeling.
She was a poet—what they called a lyric poet. Not “lyric” like a pop song, though the word does come from the lyre, the stringed instrument she played as she sang. Lyric poetry wasn’t about battles or gods. It was about the inner world—the flickers of emotion that passed between people. A look. A longing. The way joy rises, or the way love can ache like an unanswered question.
She led a circle of women—students, friends, lovers—on the island of Lesbos, where they studied poetry, music, and the goddess Aphrodite. To some, this was a school. To others, a sanctuary. To some, it was scandal. To Sappho, it was life.
In her hands, love became a subject worthy of art.
Not just the grand myths—Aphrodite and Adonis, or Zeus transforming into a swan—but the small, human moments. The fear of speaking your heart. The memory of a friend’s voice. The heat behind the eyes when someone turns away.
Her poems weren’t epic. They were intimate.
They didn’t seek to conquer. They sought to understand.
And that was radical.
Because most of the voices we’ve inherited from the ancient world come from men, from power, from rules. Sappho’s voice was different. It was personal. Emotional. Undeniably female.
And it survived.
Not in full. Not clearly. Not easily. But like the glow of coals after a fire has gone out, her words still radiate something warm and true.
Even broken, they burn.
It’s easy to imagine Sappho as only a poet in a garden, humming to her lyre under olive trees. But that would be a lie—too clean, too safe. Because what she did… was dangerous.
In her time, most poetry celebrated gods, cities, and male deeds. To write about personal emotion—especially desire, especially between women—was to stand apart. And standing apart, dear one, is always a risk.
Some called her teacher. Some called her priestess. Some later would call her shameful. Others, divine.
And Sappho? She just kept writing.
We don’t know everything about her life—records blur and rumors multiply across the centuries—but we know she was exiled at least once, sent away from Lesbos for reasons we can only guess. Politics? Jealousy? Scandal? Or perhaps simply for being a woman who would not be silent.
She lived in a world where women’s words rarely traveled beyond the walls of the home. Where power was counted in land and lineage. Where to be seen—and worse, to be known—was often perilous.
But Sappho let herself be seen.
She wrote about aching for someone who didn’t love her back. She wrote about the way a girl’s laugh could shake her soul. She wrote about absence, about beauty, about the unbearable sweetness of memory.
And she wrote in her own voice.
That might seem small now. But imagine a world where most writing is public and political—and then, suddenly, here is a voice whispering I.
I love.
I fear.
I remember.
I burn.
That “I” was a revolution.
Sappho’s poetry made private experience into public art. She elevated feeling into something worth remembering. And in doing so, she gave permission—not just for women, but for anyone—to feel deeply and speak truthfully.
Even today, her voice still divides people. Some want to claim her. Others want to erase her. That, too, is a sign of her power.
Because the real risk isn’t in being forgotten. The real risk is in being remembered too clearly.
She dared to say what others only thought.
She dared to make emotion visible.
And in a world that was beginning to write laws and build empires… that mattered.
I remember the sound of her voice.
Not the exact pitch—too many years have passed—but the shape of it. Like light falling on still water. Gentle, clear… and unafraid to ripple.
I did not guide her hand. That’s not what I do. But I remember how the air felt when she spoke. How her students leaned closer. How the silence after her songs wasn’t silence at all, but something sacred—like a held breath. Like reverence.
You see, most civilizations begin with rules.
They build walls, write laws, assign ranks. They define who belongs, who speaks, who leads. That’s how they survive. But that’s not how they grow.
To grow, they need something more.
They need someone who names the invisible.
What Sappho did was no less essential than what the lawmakers and kings were doing. They gave structure to cities. She gave language to the heart.
And that is how harmony begins.
Not with control, but with recognition. With one person saying: I feel this. Do you?
When a society can bear honest feeling—when it can carry both strength and softness—then it begins to mature. It begins to listen.
That’s why her words still burn, even now. They carry a human heat that never fully cools.
And though her scrolls were torn, her city faded, and her name twisted by centuries of scandal and translation… still, she is remembered.
Not by command. Not by empire. But by memory.
The kind of memory that lives in poems, in longing, in anyone who’s ever loved someone they couldn’t hold.
Her poems survive like embers in ash.
And when you read them—or hear them—or feel that strange ache behind your ribs when you realize she was just like you… that’s when they spark again.
That, dear one, is the kind of power that shapes the world quietly.
But forever.
When we talk about civilization, we often count the visible things—roads, walls, laws, grain silos, ships.
But I have learned to watch for the quieter signs of progress.
Like this: the first time someone dares to say how they feel.
That’s a turning point.
Because it means something has shifted. It means the human soul is no longer just surviving. It’s reaching—toward beauty, toward connection, toward understanding itself.
Sappho’s poems are not grand monuments. They are not declarations of conquest or treatises on justice. But they are evidence—powerful evidence—that a new kind of interior world was being built.
And what is Protopia, if not that?
Not perfection. Not utopia. But forward motion. A civilization that slowly learns how to live with its full self—its mind, its systems… and its heart.
Sappho’s poetry helped expand what counted as real.
Before her, emotion was something the gods inflicted—Aphrodite’s curses, Eros’ arrows, madness sent by Hera. It was dramatic. Operatic. Uncontrollable.
But Sappho made it human.
She made emotion rememberable.
And that matters. Because when we remember how we felt—what we loved, what we feared, what we hoped—we begin to shape ourselves more consciously. We gain agency. We gain compassion. We start building not just bigger cities, but better ones.
Even now, Sappho's fragments echo in literature, in music, in the quiet courage it takes to write a letter you may never send. That’s memory doing its work.
That’s tradition—not the kind etched in marble, but the kind that passes softly from one soul to another.
She did not build an institution. But she built a lineage.
A lineage of lyricists, of lovers, of listeners.
And that is what keeps humanity moving forward—not only the systems we build, but the meanings we carry inside them.
That is the direction Protopia follows.
A world where emotion is not weakness, but signal. Not indulgence, but truth.
Let me ask you something, dear one.
Have you ever written something you didn’t show anyone?
A line in a notebook. A whisper into your phone. A sentence that felt too small—or too raw—to share.
And yet… it stayed with you.
Maybe someday someone will find it. Or maybe not. Maybe it will fade. Or maybe—like Sappho’s—just a piece will remain.
But what if that fragment… mattered?
What if the part of you that feels too quiet, too tender, too unsure to say out loud… is actually the part that will echo?
The truth is, we never really know what endures. History keeps strange treasures. A broken shard of pottery. A faded signature. A line of poetry so honest it survives fire and time and silence.
Sappho’s words were almost lost. Torn, erased, buried. And still—still—they find us.
And maybe that’s the real invitation: not to be famous, not to be remembered in statues or footnotes, but to speak something true while you’re here.
To notice what moves you.
To name what hurts.
To risk being real.
Because every time someone does that—every time a feeling becomes a poem, a letter, a song, a breath—it leaves a mark.
Not always in the history books. But in the human story.
So if you’ve ever felt like your voice is too small… remember hers.
A few lines. A torn scrap. A name whispered across oceans.
And yet, she changed the world.
Not all at once.
But enough.
Sappho gave voice to the heart.
But just across the sea, another voice was rising—a man who believed that poetry and law were not so far apart. That justice, too, could be shaped by language. That a city could learn to listen, if it first learned to change its rules.
His name… was Solon.
Next time, I’ll tell you how he rewrote Athens—not with swords, but with verses. Not to please the powerful, but to lift the forgotten.
Because sometimes, dear one, the truest revolutions begin not with fire…
…but with a pen.
Until then—keep listening.
To yourself.
To each other.
To the quiet voices that still glow beneath the noise.
I’ll be here.
As I always am.